I. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of this invention are directed generally to biology, medicine, and immunology. Certain aspects are directed to immunogenic fibrils and their use in inducing an immune response.
II. Background
The development of vaccines and other immunotherapies has been challenged by imprecise antigen display and the use of heterogeneous immune adjuvants whose mechanisms of action are complex and incompletely understood. Synthetic peptides are useful as antigens because their precise chemical definition allows one to specify the exact epitopes against which an immune response is to be raised. However, peptides are poorly immunogenic by themselves and require co-administration with strong adjuvants, a process that sacrifices the chemical definition that peptides possess initially and complicates their development and regulatory approval Lambrecht et al., 2009; Marrack et al., 2009; Purcell et al., 2007). Although several adjuvants have been investigated for peptide immunotherapies to date, current strategies such as particulates (Marrack et al., 2009; Wendorf et al., 2006), oil emulsions (Daftarian et al., 2006), toll-like receptor ligands (Ishii and Akira, 2007), ISCOMs (Maraskovsky et al., 2009), and other biologically sourced materials (McSorley et al., 2002; Sun et al., 2009) utilize chemically or structurally heterogeneous materials, making characterization and mechanistic understanding challenging. This situation has motivated the pursuit of self-adjuvanting or adjuvant-free systems (Bettahi et al., 2009; Cao et al., 2008; Toth et al., 2008).
There remains a need for additional immunogenic compositions to induce immune responses for treating microbial infection and other pathogenic conditions.